1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a protective enclosure for limiting, or excluding, a person's exposure to heat, smoke, soot, dust and other environmental hazards during fire or other emergency where a hazardous atmosphere is found, and/or where a victim is in need of being rescued and/or moved.
Victims found in house fires and other hazardous environments, are most often simply dragged or carried by rescuers unprotected to safety. During rescue victims may suffer injuries to the exterior and interior of their bodies. The problem could be partially solved by fire blankets, but this only addresses protection to the exterior of a victim, i.e. skin. Protective hoods also partially solve the problem, but only protect the head, face, and breathing air and leave the body unprotected. Finally fully encapsulating suits have been introduced, but are impractical and difficult to use during a fire rescue emergency and provide inferior fire and heat protection.
2. Description of Related Art
There a variety of fire escape and protective devices used for self rescue or the rescuing of a victim by carrying, dragging, or lowering victims from hazardous areas or multi level structures. These range from fire blankets, fire resistive wraps, fire hoods, lowering harnesses and transport devices.
Examples of such devices may be seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,102,128; 5,309,571; 6,195,822; and patent application US 2007/0234464 A1. However none of these patents disclose devices able to perform in a professional fire and rescue capacity, where it is important to perform several or all of these needs together. A means of securing a patient in a thermally protective encapsulating device, providing safe breathing air, be easily deployed in limited visibility situations and can then be easily carried by a rescuer, or lowered/raised using ropes or cables.
Consequently, there is a need for an improved rescue device for firefighters or rescuers to protect a person's body and air supply, and to function as a portable and secure carrying, raising, and lowering device when moving victims found in structural fires or other hazardous atmospheres. This device is needed to be portable, stow able, manageable with bulky protective gloves, and operable in limited visibility situations.